Avoiding Plagiarism
Academic Honesty & Writing Assignments
When writing academic essays and other papers, you'll want to be careful to assign credit for ideas and even phrasing to any and all sources of the information in your paper. Academics assign credit by citing sources following a specific citation style guide (ex., MLA, APA, Chicago, etc.).
This practice of assigning credit using citation reflects the fact that individuality and ownership of even intellectual "property" are prominent Western cultural values and norms.
At Canadian universities, relying on source material without attribution will be interpreted as a dishonest attempt to take credit for someone else's ideas, phrasing, effort, etc. This is what is referred to as plagiarism.
To avoid giving the impression of taking credit for someone else's work, do your best to indicate that the information is from a source in the same sentence, like this:
Bell finds that breakfast is the most skipped meal among full-time working professionals.
Breakfast is the most skipped meal among full-time working professionals (Bell).
Ensuring that you make an effort to attribute information to its source is the best way to avoid serious charges of plagiarism, even if you get some of the citation mechanics wrong.
Invest in learning how to cite appropriately and effectively within your chosen disciplines of study:
- Pay attention to citation and source engagement strategies in your assigned readings and emulate those approaches.
- Work with experts at the Writing Centre and the Library.
- Ask your professors specific questions about how to cite and engage with sources.
How to create intellectual property
Just like you can own material things, you can own the intellectual and artistic work that you produce. There are some rules about ownership, though. Primarily, you've got to have created it yourself.
So how do you create intellectual property?
According to Ferguson, this is a process that involves some copying of borrowed material in addition to combining and transforming. In academic writing you can think of it this way:
report what others have said;
make connections between their ideas (compare, contrast, grouping, synthesis, etc.);
apply and repurpose their ideas to your specific context.
Doing this work allows you to build upon existing conversations, offering something you've created to them.
> Activity: Look for ways the author reports what others have said, makes connections between their ideas, & applies and repurposes their ideas to say something new in the following paragraph.
The enduring global affection for cats became abundantly evident in their global takeover of Internet memes and GIFs. Their popularity has much to do with their "irresistible adorableness" (Groom, 2018, p. 72), resulting from their prominent eyes, soft fur, and playfulness. In fact, Zhu (2011) explains that these features are perceived by humans as "infant-like" (p. 143) and cause humans to feel a sense of protectiveness for cats. According to Katz (2017), however, meme and GIF culture pick up on (and play with) the contrast between cats' adorable innocent features and their playful, wiley, sometimes downright evil behaviour. For this reason, meme and GIF culture prompt us to ask whether the multi-dimensionality of cats, including the contrast between cute, wiley, and evil, makes the human love for them endure.
Myth: Shakespeare was a genius writer who didn't need to work with sources or draw inspiration from others.
The idea of the lone genius writer is a myth.
Popular notions of originality and the lone genius writer are mythical; our heroes of original works are social creatures just as much as the rest of us (which should be celebrated, not obscured).
We're always working with cultural material; "originality" actually involves copying, combining, & transforming cultural material to produce something "new."